He broke off, took a last swallow, and dropped the bottle to the grass.
When he was able to speak again, his tone was fatalistic. “There was a reason I never had kids before, and it wasn’t what you think, that I cared about work too much. It was that I knew having people depend on me would lead to errors in judgment.”
“I depended on you.”
“No. You would’ve depended on me, if I’d let you. But I didn’t. I kept you at a distance. I thought it was the best thing I could do for you, that I could shove you out of harm’s reach. And look what happened. It’s my fault you’re in the mess you’re in.”
“Shut up,” I told him, though a part of me responded urgently to this confession, which scraped an ancient wound. I thought again of what Car had told me when we interviewed the witness who’d placed Jane Doe and Sims together—that Teddy’s weakness, the one thing he couldn’t stand to lose, and therefore the leverage guys like Santorez and later Wilder had on him, was me.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” I went on, putting these feelings aside. “It doesn’t matter how we got into this situation. Focus on getting us out.”
His voice was plaintive. “How on earth are we going to do that?”
“To start with, tomorrow you need to go back to work. It’s important, for now, for both of us to act as if nothing’s changed.”
He gave me a look of defiance, making clear the impossibility of what I’d asked. Then he seemed to put aside his protest in favor of a more pressing question. “You talked about building a case. What’d you mean?”
It would have to be an airtight case, I realized, with enough evidence to put all of them away forever. The first problem with this was there was no guarantee the police would take our evidence at face value, no matter how ironclad it was. In addition, there was nothing stopping the government from turning around and prosecuting us, contenting itself with the opportunity to settle old scores with Teddy, who, a few minutes ago, had as much as confessed to playing a central role in laundering Wilder’s money.
More practically, I doubted my brother’s ability to reconstruct Wilder’s scheme with sufficient clarity and detail to prove a complex financial crime beyond a reasonable doubt. No, I realized, my idea of bringing the government the evidence it needed to convict Wilder and his associates was a pipe dream. At best, we’d probably end up in prison, which was tantamount to a death sentence, given that Wilder’s crew was the main power structure behind bars. At worst, we’d accomplish nothing more than to put targets on our backs for men whose professional identity consisted of an eagerness to commit savage murders.
“I don’t know what I meant,” I told him, admitting defeat. “Dad told me he had a plan, an ‘exit strategy,’ as he called it, but he didn’t share it with me.”
“He wasn’t acting like someone who was trying to get out.”
“I’m beginning to see that. Jesus, he was so goddamn arrogant, thinking he could pull this off on his own. You have any idea what this so-called exit strategy was?”
“It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.” A note of challenge now entered Teddy’s voice. “Sounds as though he told you things you’ve been keeping from me.”
I had to acknowledge the justice of this accusation. So I told him what little I knew, leaving out for now the evident connection between Sims and my Jane Doe case. First, I revealed what I knew about Sims—that he’d been in prison with Dad and Bo—and then, even more significantly, I told him that in the final conversation I’d had with our father before his murder, Lawrence had promised to “deal with” Sims for what he’d done to Carly at the baseball game.
“That same conversation was when he told me about his ‘exit strategy,’” I said, concluding my explanation. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t have anything definite in mind. You know Dad, always promising more than he could deliver. Maybe he was just trying to keep me from doing something crazy, like running to the cops about Sims.”
“You haven’t mentioned his name to the detectives working Dad’s case,” Teddy said, confirming what he already knew.
“No, and I’m angry with myself that I haven’t,” I told him. “I can’t stop thinking of what happened at the baseball game, those awful minutes when we couldn’t find Carly.”
“So you think Dad confronted Sims, warned him to keep his distance from Carly or else, and then Sims killed him and Dot for it.”
“Possibly,” I said. “Or maybe it’s like what you say, that he was killed because a play’s being made against Wilder. I could see how Dad, being an outsider whom Wilder was using to spy on bona fide members of the AB, might have been a natural target.”
But, in truth, I didn’t think this was what had happened. Our father had believed he was smarter than everyone else, and, as a consequence, had likely underestimated the intelligence of these men whose cunning he ought to have feared. For this, he’d paid the ultimate price. The important thing now was not to repeat his errors.
“Or maybe someone found out about Dad’s ‘exit strategy,’ and cut him off to prevent him from compromising the organization,” I said. “Or simply to punish him for having the audacity to think he had a choice.”
“They thought they owned him,” Teddy agreed.
I looked at him. “Bo had Russell Bell murdered because he wanted Lawrence on the outside, working for him. If Bell had lived to testify in the retrial, we both know Lawrence would have been convicted.”
I went on to explain my theory that Sims could have been Bell’s executioner, having been paroled just in time to pull the trigger. “You know, I doubt Lawrence would have given Sims the kind of thank-you he expected. And ingratitude is just a hair’s breadth from disrespect, after all.”
Teddy vigorously rubbed his brow, then his face, as if our speculations had left a tangible residue of fear on his skin. I felt it, too. Evening was falling, we were no closer to an answer than before, and none of the possible theories we’d come up with held any comfort for us. The common element seemed to be that we were screwed. Still, knowing this as a certainty felt, in a certain beery light, like progress.
I decided to stay, and we ordered a pizza. After we’d eaten, Teddy called Tamara and said good night to Carly over the phone. Sitting outside by myself in the cool evening, I tried unsuccessfully not to listen to his end of the conversation, conducted in the family’s small kitchen on the other side of the window that opened onto the backyard. I overheard no talk of Teddy heading there at any point, nor of his wife and daughter returning here.
It was a while before he came out with another pair of beers, his face grim and heartbroken. In the silent interim, I’d been trying to understand my reasons for withholding my conversation with Wilder from my account of facts relevant to Lawrence’s death. I’d vowed not to repeat my father’s mistakes. Wasn’t withholding vital information from my brother breaking that promise?
And yet I couldn’t truly blame Lawrence for keeping us in the dark, because I knew his arrogance hadn’t been self-interested. Rather, he’d sought to protect us, probably believing that by suppressing dangerous knowledge, he could shield us from the consequences of his acts. Though hampered now by my ignorance of all that our father had chosen not to tell us, I’d no intention of revealing to Teddy the channel that had recently opened between me and Wilder, nor my hope of somehow using Jane Doe’s case to improve our situation.
Her case was connected to a vital interest of ours—I was sure of it.
Teddy handed me my beer. We touched the necks of our bottles. “To an exit strategy,” I proposed.
“Don’t get pissed—but I think I know how he was going to do it,” my brother said. “Only the very idea of it scares me.”
“I’m listening,” I told him.
CHAPTER 10
I woke at dawn on Teddy’s couch, hungover and exhausted after a night of desperate dreams. In a repeating nightmare, I’d found myself running down a dark street, fleeing one set of pursuers only to come face-
to-face with another group equally bent on doing me harm. Forced to whirl and flee, escaping the rough hands that grabbed for my legs and arms, I’d then chosen a different direction—and run head-on into the ones I’d thought were behind me before. And so on, again and again, like a repeating refrain on a scratched CD.
My body was stiff and chilled, my shirt damp with the drying remnants of the cold sweat that had briefly awakened me around 3 A.M. The door to the master bedroom was open, and Teddy was snoring away, huddled over on one side of the queen bed that filled most of the floor space, leaving just a few feet of walking room on either side. The stale odor of beer and sweat was overpowering. I walked into the kitchen, started coffee in the pot, then stepped into the backyard and surveyed the mess of bottles scattered around the chairs we’d occupied late into the night. The plans we’d hatched seemed foolish in the fog-soaked morning.
Just crumple it all up and throw it away, I told myself, feeling as if someone had done just that to my throbbing brain. I went back inside, poured a glass of water and drank it quickly, then stood over the sink squinting at my reflection in the chrome until I was sure the water would stay where it was.
I heard the bedsprings creak. Teddy was up, moving slowly at first but then with quickening speed into the washroom, where the toilet lid banged and I heard him retch, then spit into the water before he flushed, groaning. I grabbed the recycling bin, carried it into the backyard, and began scooping bottles into it. Next door someone closed a window with a bang, a clear rebuke. I winced, wondering how much of our wild talk last night had been audible to Teddy’s neighbors, or to anyone else who might have happened to be lurking nearby. This wasn’t mere paranoia on my part. From what Teddy had told me, doing nothing at this point wasn’t an option. Thanks to what our father had set in motion, we had the choice of acting now or waiting until bad trouble found us.
In truth, it already had. The bombshell my brother had dropped on me was that yesterday afternoon, he’d had a visit from the FBI.
He’d gone on foot, as usual, to pick Carly up at preschool. On their walk home, again as usual, they’d stopped at a pocket park about halfway between their house and the school. They’d had it to themselves until another father arrived with a little girl around Carly’s age. The dads had nodded to each other. Then, as the girls began to play together, the man—whom Teddy described as white, in his early forties, balding, with the compact build of a wrestler—stepped closer to Teddy and surreptitiously handed him a card identifying himself as Mark Braxton, an assistant special agent in charge at the San Francisco field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Teddy hadn’t known what to say. He’d held the card, staring down at it with as much astonishment as if the man had shown him a naked picture of himself, until Braxton suggested in a low voice that he didn’t think they were being watched, but just to be on the safe side he might want to put away the card. Teddy would have turned and left him then if he’d been alone, but the G-man had planned his approach perfectly. The little girls were laughing, taking turns bumping down the slide on the play structure, instant friends, and Teddy knew he’d be unable to leave anytime soon without causing a scene with Carly.
His companion, in the end, had left plenty unsaid, but he’d made clear to Teddy that he and his family were in danger, with the Bureau the only friend they had. “I want to express my condolences,” he’d told my brother. “Your father was a good man. The day of his murder was the worst one of my career. You’ve made an admirable life for yourself and your family, but it can’t last. If you’re worried about the situation and want my help getting out of it, just contact me at this number. I’ll do everything in my power to see you don’t end up like him.”
Braxton hadn’t come right out and revealed that Lawrence had been working as a government informant, feeding the FBI particulars about Wilder’s operations, but it was the conclusion Teddy had drawn. “If you were trying to get out of a situation like that, would you be meeting with Wilder’s guys, showing your face, putting yourself in the middle of their business? Hell, no. When I asked Dad what he was doing, he said, ‘Would you rather I be indispensable, or dispensable?’ He used to brag that, thanks to Bo, he had what he called an ‘all-entry pass.’ That meant he could go anywhere, see anything. I told him he was crazy to put himself forward like that.”
“So now you think the FBI, not Bo, was pulling the strings,” I said.
But I was aware, too, of another possibility—that Braxton merely wanted Teddy to believe our father had been an informant, as a means of persuading him to offer his services. For all Lawrence’s deviousness, I found it hard to think of him as a snitch.
Yet what other exit strategy could he possibly have had?
Teddy, it seemed, had readily swallowed the confidential-informant theory. But I had another insight, and immediately voiced it. “Obviously there were preexisting conflicts within the organization, given that Bo felt he had to use an outsider like Dad as his eyes and ears. It’s possible Dad was not just documenting the organization, but also sabotaging it, planting suspicions and deepening fractures. I could see him going for that.”
My father, after all, had been one of the shrewdest people I’d ever known, and possessed all the capabilities the feds would be looking for in a confidential informant. As an exonerated convict, he’d have made a compelling witness. Plus, the idea of planting slow-ticking psychological bombs as a one-man insurgency struck me as the kind of activity he’d have relished, and the one most likely to have gotten him and Dot killed.
In the night, with plenty of beer in us, we’d spun it all out and arrived at the only solution that, under a cloak of darkness, seemed to offer a path—picking up where our father had left off and, somehow, playing the game to the end. This meant, of course, trusting the feds to ensure our safety in exchange for information.
Shortly after my father’s release, Teddy and Bo had been in contact, he reminded me, Wilder having reached out to my brother in the same way he’d recently done to me again. This, though, was a fact I hadn’t shared with him.
“No offense, but you can’t pull this off,” I’d told Teddy firmly. “If anyone’s going to become a CI, it has to be me.”
Now, hungover, I saw our situation in a different light. Teddy’s household was surely in danger, just as Braxton had warned. If Lawrence had been killed because he was suspected of working with the FBI, such mistrust would extend to the son who’d entered the organization at the same time. That nothing so far had happened to Teddy, Tam, or Carly might indicate only that our enemies were watching for him to make a move. Or possibly they were simply waiting for the heat to cool before they rubbed out other Maxwells. Also, it wasn’t entirely out of the question that they believed they had nothing to fear from Teddy and thus could bide their time.
My brother joined me outside, handing me a cup of coffee, his eyes bloodshot. “You thought anymore how you want to approach this?” he asked, referring to the first step in our now dubious-sounding plan, which was for me to make contact with Braxton and learn what it would take for him to honor whatever deal he’d promised our father.
I didn’t reply. Not right away. It was clear to me I’d lost my appetite for discussing dangerous subjects aloud. When I did answer, I told him I needed to think some more. And I promised to call him later.
Waiting in rush-hour traffic to cross the bridge, I told myself that if Lawrence was working for the FBI, he must have recognized the possible outcomes, understood the risks. He’d taken them anyway, believed this was the only course to protect his family. He’d failed. But his failure had pointed the way forward for us.
I had Braxton’s card in my wallet, but now wasn’t the time to make use of it. He’d made an overture to Teddy, and the worst move would be to run immediately into his arms, indicating we were desperate for protection. I’d worked as a defense lawyer long enough to believe that all government agents were essentially alike. In any negotiation, they started from the assumpt
ion that they were the ones who controlled the outcome. To bargain successfully, you had to make them believe that you had something they wanted,
usually information they weren’t going to learn unless they cut your client a sweetheart deal.
It wasn’t lost on me that Braxton had approached Teddy rather than me. I didn’t like to admit that this bothered me, but it did. Again, I reminded myself not to overlook the possibility that he was seizing on the murder as an opportunity to trick us into believing Lawrence had been working for the government. Perhaps, in fact, he’d rebuffed the FBI’s approach, with Braxton counting on our not knowing this. Before I could ever consider trusting him with our lives, I needed confirmation that our father had been a CI.
The trouble was, only Lawrence and Braxton, along with the G-man’s superiors, could have known this fact for certain. Our father hadn’t revealed his secrets to anyone.
Lawrence’s urn—a sealed wood composite box a little smaller than a shoebox, engraved with his name, date of birth, and date of death—was housed temporarily in my office, on a bookshelf. Having vetoed Teddy’s plan to scatter the ashes on our mother’s grave, I didn’t know what else to do with the remains. For the time being, then, it offered a reproach to me, an emblem of all the emotions that had kept me tossing and turning the previous night.
Sitting at my desk, I slowly came to the conclusion that I had no independent means of determining what my father’s relationship to the FBI might have been. Still, I couldn’t let the FBI know that my father had kept me in the dark. As long as there was a chance Braxton wanted something from me, I needed him to believe I was the key to unlocking the secrets that my father had been killed to keep under wraps.
The only angle I had on anyone was Sims, who was connected in some way both with the Jane Doe case and, probably, with Lawrence’s murder.
Later, when Car and I met at Schroeder’s, an indoor beer garden in the Financial District, he told me what he’d managed to learn.
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